We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

by Karen Joy Fowler

Only he said this at much greater length, longer than either Lowell or I, or certainly Fern, wished to sit still for. It all had something to do with Umwelt, a word I very much liked the sound of and repeated many times like a drumbeat until I was made to stop. I didn’t care so much what Umwelt meant back then, but it turns out to refer to the specific way each particular organism experiences the world.

But where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail.

that rule where you say only one for every three things you want to say—it wasn’t nearly sufficient to the cause).

For years, I imagined Fern’s life as a Tarzan reversal. Raised among humans and returned now to her own kind, I liked to think of her bringing sign language to the other apes. I liked to think she was maybe solving crimes or something. I liked to think we’d given her superpowers.

Parents are too innocent for the Boschian landscapes of middle school.

The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you’ve gone over that cliff.

Take astronomy and maybe there’s a section devoted to exploration, to those pioneering dogs and chimps of space. You might be shown the photos of the space chimps in their helmets, grinning from ear to ear, and you might feel an urge to tell the rest of your class that chimps grin like that only when they’re frightened, that no amount of time among humans will change it. Those happy-looking space chimps in those pictures are frankly terrified and maybe you just barely stop yourself from saying so.

According to solipsism, reality exists only inside your own mind. What follows then is that you can only be certain of your own status as a conscious being.

When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk.

When a portent repeats itself three times, like something out of Julius Caesar, even Caliban, a couple of plays over, is bound to notice.

Harlow had found him on the third-floor balcony, practicing tai chi under the overhang, and running through his kill lines. “Wipe that face off your head, bitch. Your ass is as dead as fucking fried chicken.” Ezra had told me once that, as he goes about his life, he’s constantly running the movie version in his head, but I think a lot of people do that. Though maybe in a genre different from Ezra’s.

He asked us rhetorically if doctrinal differences simply provided cover for our primate and viciously tribal selves, which was so much like something my father would have said I felt an unreasonable impulse to object on those grounds alone.

He repeated a thing he’d said many times before—that most religions were obsessed with policing female sexual behavior, that for many it was their entire raison d’être.

When I could hear again, Dr. Sosa had moved on from common chimps to their (and our) close relations, the bonobos. “Bonobo society,” he said, “is peaceful and egalitarian.

Ithyphallic, one might be tempted to say.

“Bonobos are matriarchal,” the young woman said. “How do you know it’s the sex and not the matriarchy that makes a society peaceful? Female solidarity. Females protecting other females. Bonobos have it. Chimps and humans don’t.”

And this, then, is the human tragedy—that the common humanity we share is fundamentally based on the denial of a common shared humanity.”

About Washoe, Roger Fouts has said, she taught him that in the phrase human being, the word being is much more important than the word human.

“Charlotte isn’t a superhero just because she’s a spider and can leap from wall to wall on her web. Her superpower is that she can read and write. Context matters. Context is all. Umwelt.”

I was happy then, and happy now, lying on my bed remembering this. How one night I’d gone to fairyland with my brother, and the very best part was that he’d had no particular reason to ask me along, nothing he’d needed me to do. He’d brought me with him just because.

Life is all arrivals and departures.

The flip side to solipsism is called theory of mind. Theory of mind postulates that, even though these cannot be directly observed, we readily impute mental states to others (and also to ourselves, since the bedrock proposal is that we understand our own mental states well enough to generalize from them). And so we constantly infer someone else’s intentions, thoughts, knowledge, lack of knowledge, doubts, desires, beliefs, guesses, promises, preferences, purposes, and many, many more things in order to behave as social creatures in the world.

We call them feelings because we feel them.

They don’t start in our minds, they arise in our bodies, is what my mother always said, with the great materialist William James as backup.

So many problems, however infinitely varied they first appear, turn out to be matters of money. I can’t tell you how much this offends me. The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don’t; it’s the Emperor’s New Clothes gone global.

I still haven’t found that place where I can be my true self. But maybe you never get to be your true self, either.

Long-term memory is more difficult to study. In 1972, Endel Tulving coined the phrase episodic memory to refer to the ability to remember incidents in one’s individual life with detailed temporal and spatial information (the what, when, where) and then access them later as episodes through a conscious reexperiencing of them, a sort of mental time travel.

Episodic memory, he said, is a uniquely human gift.

Episodic memory has certain subjective features. It comes with something called “a feeling of pastness,” and also a feeling of confidence, however misplaced, in the accuracy of recollection. These interiorities can never be observed in another species. Doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Doesn’t mean they are.

He’d been picked up in Orlando, where, in addition to a list of charges roughly the size of War and Peace, the police contended he’d been in the final stages of planning an attack on SeaWorld.

a chalk outline around the space where they should have been.

So I expect the allegations are true, although an “attack on SeaWorld” might mean a bomb, or it might mean graffiti and glitter and a cream pie in the face. The government doesn’t always seem to distinguish between the two.

Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through.

No Utopia is Utopia for everyone.